ALAN writes:

Fifty years ago, there were only three television networks in America and no such thing as around-the-clock TV entertainment. But some Americans thought that even that was too much.

Years before Marie Winn’s The Plug-In Drug (1977) and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), veteran entertainer and show business legend George Jessel saw a menace in push-button entertainment so easily available. In 1968, he said in The Great Comedians Talk About Comedy [Citadel Press, 1968]:

“…..I think the amount of television we have is a terrible curse to our country…..because I see us completely degenerating.   ….the nation has been sort of intrigued or drugged to stay at home…..”

“There’s so little show business today in the United States,” he said, meaning: So little live theater of the kind where you could take your children and your Aunt Tilly on a Saturday afternoon. He was remembering a time when stage plays were common and where you had to get dressed up to go and where your children could learn how to dress and behave properly in public settings.

At one time there were 25 theaters in St. Louis that offered live entertainment ranging from vaudeville to stage plays, and performers ranging from Ethel Barrymore, Sarah Bernhardt, and Bob Hope to Jack Benny, Fred Astaire, and George Jessel. All but three of those theaters were demolished—along with the frame of mind in which people understood entertainment to be something out of the ordinary, a special occasion, something set apart. 

Never in history before the twentieth century was entertainment available to people every hour of their lives. Never in history did people imagine it would be a good thing if it were.

Radio delivered the first blow to that frame of mind by offering continuous entertainment at minimal cost. Television delivered the second and fatal blow by adding pictures to sound.

The incredible decline in standards that we have witnessed since the 1960s was permitted by the first generations who grew up on a steady diet of continuous TV entertainment. It is a progression of the degeneracy that a few observers like George Jessel began to notice in that decade.

That there is “junk TV” is obvious. But the problem is not “just” that Americans have more television today than Mr. Jessel in 1968 could have imagined possible and that most of it is junk.  The problem is the very form and presence of television. It is that television is the slickest purveyor of lies, misinformation, and filth ever invented; that Americans have made television a centerpiece of their lives and permit it to shape the substance of their moral-philosophical worldview and frame of mind;  that that worldview is entirely Leftist-Modernist, which means: Antithetical to reason, restraint, responsibility, memory, imagination, conceptual thought, history, and most of our heritage and traditions; and that entire generations who have now imbibed that worldview from more-or-less constant exposure to television are utterly incapable of imagining any other ways of thinking or living.

Observe that many people today imagine that their constant exposure to television throughout their childhood has made them “better educated.” Then observe that many of them cannot speak sensibly or write a coherent paragraph. By contrast, George Jessel had minimal schooling, became a voracious reader, wrote ten books, became an accomplished public speaker, and delivered hundreds of after-dinner speeches and eulogies. What he didn’t have in his boyhood was television screens.

Imagine what he would say if he were here today and could see how mindlessly Americans now immerse themselves and their children in a sea of canned, non-stop, push-button entertainment on their multiple televisions at home and in countless public and semi-public places. Who could calculate the brain rot induced by all that passivity? Americans have made what once was a nation of grown-ups into a fun-house of sponges soaking up poison.

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